


lingering

by Lvslie



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Domestics, Established Relationship, F/M, First Time, Introspection, Pete's World, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-09-09 05:31:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8877826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lvslie/pseuds/Lvslie
Summary: There is a life in which he exists in a different way. The Doctor’s stolen glimpses into Pete's World.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my pre-Christmas contribution to @timepetalsprompts for the winter bingo – ‘blizzard’ combined with Tentoo free for all which I missed the first time. A very messy (they keep getting messier, honestly) sketch and a ficlet.

_ _

_ _

_…_

_There is a life in which he exists in a different way._

_Sometimes when he closes his eyes at night and allows himself to lose awareness of the world’s syntax, he can almost get a glimpse of it._

_A hue of colour, perhaps. A sound. Sometimes a hint of taste._

… 

She’s young (outrageously young) but he looks young, too. She’s soft-shaped and has gentle eyes. Feels warmer than anything he can think of.

He holds her hand on the approximate basis of twenty times per day. It’s cheesy perhaps, and at times a bit inconvenient, but he pointedly ignores the thought of labelling this practice as being clingy. 

And sometimes, when he forgets he can, she holds his hand instead. 

They live in a flat which is surprisingly spacious and excessively blue. When their IKEA trolley fills up with the colour, he’s only a bit embarrassed – mostly, he’s busy being embarrassed about getting lost. 

She buys him a jar of odd Swedish jam (but not quite jam) so that his previously undefeated Time Lord orientation and ego don’t feel too wounded. 

They sleep in a circular bed with fluffy blue sheets. The pillows are white. 

He pretends he doesn’t have nightmares at first. His tactile human hands are restless, though, and he can’t keep them from reaching out to her. She's warm and her heart is beating. He’s ridiculously glad she’s there. He’s ridiculously scared one day she will not. This way he doesn’t get to think. 

He clings to her and she runs her fingers through his hair. She likes his hair. 

One peculiarly blue-grey night, he drags her out of bed with him and they sit in the little kitchen, drinking consecutive cups of various kinds of tea. Almost wordless, pyjama-clad knees bumping together as they sit on the counter. It’s green with jasmine when she drowsily declares sleeping at night is sham and they should do it more often. It’s a slowly pinking dawn and her hair is falling loose from the messy knot and her face is lit up in a peachy blaze, tired and warm-eyed. He thinks he loves her just a bit too much. 

He pulls her to himself and kisses: roughly. It feels dizzying and almost surreal as they tumble into messy sheets. Her skin tastes better than the tea. She makes lovely sounds. He categorises them in his head. Her cheeks are flushed the next day and he’s entranced. 

He wears chucks with jeans and hoodies and a leather jacket thrown on top. It’s short, much shorter than he’s used to, matches hers. A lot of his things match hers. She buys him sweatpants and he pointedly never wears them. Except when he does and she looks absurdly smug all day. 

But it works two ways. He’s elated to find her eating jam out of a jar with a teaspoon. Licks some of it from her lips. 

He likes her lips. 

She drives the car. It’s small and red and polished and smells of bananas because apparently they _do_ produce such air conditioners. She only ever lets him drive once but he crashes into a park bench and tries to blame it on the pidgeons. They don’t mention it very often. 

Well, unless she wants to have a point in some sort of an argument. He doesn’t like the arguments. They all usually end in him sleeping on the blue and deceptively uncomfortable couch in the living room. 

He’s not used to sleeping without her by this point. He squirms. 

But usually, she waddles up to the couch in the middle of the night and crams herself into the tiny, uncomfortably empty space about him, making it warmer, a bit more potentially back-ache inducing and infinitely better.  _Shut up,_  she tells him when he grins and pulls her closer. 

Sometimes they tumble off the couch and onto the fluffy carpet flung over the wooden floor. He doesn’t mind. He tries to tickle her when she groans and earns a half-hearted smack across the forehead. Eventually, she laughs. 

She swears a lot in the mornings and makes them coffee. He doesn’t particularly like coffee. He likes having it with her, though: he likes the sound of her sleep-muffled voice and the anecdotes from work they both know all too well. 

They don’t have milk. Milk in this world has a vague pear-y scent. He’s too suspicious to test whether they’re in the taste as well. She graciously doesn’t laugh at him about it. 

Well. Not  _too much_. 

Sometimes on Sundays they visit her parents.  _Almost-parents;_  he insists and she rolls her eyes;  _the ratio is evenly 50-50_.  _Plus the little brother._  He doesn’t fancy Sundays much and vocally expresses the disdain for her mother’s cooking. 

He sneaks out from the guestroom in the middle of the night to steal out her cookies even so. He dabs them in jam while corrupting the little brother with alien stories. She finds them in the morning, dozing on the floor under an impossibly dusty old rug he must’ve dug up from the house’s previous owner’s grave. Papier-mâché planets sway above them, suspended on thin blue strings. 

He cooks.  _Tries_  to cook. Makes a few attempts at cooking. She tries to be supportive. Her ribs ache from laughing. 

He sits on the floor on the bedroom while she showers and dismantles old radios for parts. He says he has a plan, that they will be travelling in no time, but never explains it. She’s careful not to ask. 

She steals his clothes. It’s cautious and seemingly inconscpicious at first so that he doesn’t notice. ( _He does._ ) A borrowed hoodie, because she didn’t have time to do the laundry. A hastily-grabbed scarf. 

A T-shirt. She makes a show of disliking his T-shirts. Buys him lots and lots of button-ups and complains about his clothing experiments. He ignores it all with smiling eyes and a wordless challenge. 

She travels to France for three days to study Braxian public relations and finds a Hulk T-shirt tucked neatly into her suitcase. She doesn’t remember ever packing it. She wears it to sleep every night. 

He texts a lot. She struggles to keep a straight face when her phone continues to beep shrilly throughout yet another important meeting. She gets thrown out of it. Reads out the messages on the brightly lit sterile-smelling corridor and groans at the anecdotes about dragon chickens and card tricks. Considers not replying. Replies even so. And can she  _please consider turning off the sound?_   _No_ , she says stubbornly.  _No, it’s … it’s not an option._

They’re not  _married_. Not in her mother’s opinion, at least. Not properly so. The backyard of a sieged museum ( _an alien experiment site_ , he interjects stubbornly, and she rolls her eyes again) in Kansas in the middle of a downpour is no place to get married. Neither is the senile caretaker an appropriate minister. 

They both insist it all counts.

She brings a cat home once and he sulks for three days.  _The cat was abandoned_ , she argues,  _loaded with gamma radiation it ought not to have survived, it started glowing orange in the night. The owners got scared. Let’s keep it._  As much as he tries to prompt it, the allergy for fur simply won’t show. He grudgingly befriends the cat. There’s a saying, after all, about keeping enemies close. 

She keeps laughing. 

… 

_Sometimes the images are clearer._

… 

It’s a mute deaf winter night: snow swirling sloppily all about them, dimmed warm light melting into pink-tinted darkness, lampposts flickering among the snowflakes that slowly begin to compose a blizzard. Her cheeks and nose are pink from cold. 

It’s cold, piercingly cold: something that’s never bothered him before but now very much does. So cold he’s trying to sink into his scarf while still being able look at her. She seems to be stifling a laugh.

She laughs a lot these days. He likes that. 

“How’s that jacket doing for you?” she asks, voice rich with mirth. 

“Fine,” he declares stubbornly, “perfectly fine. I’ve told you before and I’m going to tell you once again: Time Lords don’t get cold.” 

It’s a blatant lie and his stiffened nose and muffled voice seem to traitorously counter their owner’s words. 

She’s grinning now: drowned in hues of red and yellow, small and speckled with snow. He has an idea. 

“But, Rose Tyler, there indeed _are_ certain top secret techniques of further improvement for Time Lord warmth levels,” he says, in a hopefully husky and not simply throaty voice. 

“Am I to be trusted with such a great mystery?” she snickers, not even remotely bashful to be making fun of him, pulling lightly at his scarf. 

He leans in and whispers in her ear. 

She laughs. 

… 

_Sometimes they fade away._

… 

He wakes up at night drenched in sweat. Keeps forgetting how to breathe, tries to scream and chokes on air. His body aches dully without cause, veins and skin and bones on fire and  _he regenerated_ , he whispers feverishly, clutching at her hand.  _He regenerated_. She looks at him: eyes wet, huge.  _Is he okay?_  And all he can say is, _I don’t know. I don’t know._  She clings to him and holds him close and he can feel she’s crying. But he’s crying, too. He’s not quite sure why. 

…

_He’s never sure if he’s not simply dreaming. In his life, it’s among the snow that she walks away._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt was 'i don’t want to love anybody else' and it’s been ages since someone anonymous on tumblr had asked me to write this, so i might as well be sending this to the void. but if you’re still there, nonny, thank you for your patience, and as it works very well as a follow-up to lingering, i've decided to include it here. it’s a little more bittersweet than simply fluffy, but human life tends to be.

Human lives are so absurd, he thinks. So messy. How does one even manage to walk straight without predicting the spatial location of all the lampposts they can walk into?

...

She dyes her hair auburn. He has a very definite opinion on it, but can’t quite put it in words. It’s a new thing for him, moderately annoying: this hesitance. As though the new limit to the words he’ll be granted with having a chance to utter in a lifespan places some obligatory value on each of them. It’s all a little bit absurd; he knows she’d roll her eyes if he voiced the sentiment.

‘I’m rude,’ he says finally, over coffee, with a brittle grin, ‘and you’re ginger. The ultimate combination.’

‘That was such cheese,’ she mutters.

…

He likes what he does. Well, _sort of_. He’s not particularly impressed with the way he runs out of breath while running, and not at all with the way his hands tremble afterwards— _tremble_ , uncontrollably and mysteriously, little twitches of relieved tension. So incomprehensible and human that all he can do is stare at them with a mixture of horror and fascination, until _her_ hand comes down onto his shoulder, and offers some semblance of steadiness.

…

She likes touching his hair.

She does it a lot: musses it up almost instinctively during the day, with a smirk or with a flick of her fingers. He thinks it might be an ongoing joke, but then he thinks about all the ways in which listens for the lilting rise and fall of her breathing at night, when he wakes damp from sweat and bitingly cold, pins and needles down his arms and feet, and counts the seconds that have passed from that shimmery blue disappearing business on the beach.

( _Surely, if anything was about to come to an end, it would have already?_ )

But he’s not sure. He can’t remember what it feels like, being.

…

They’re doing the groceries (banana milk, chips and jam, because he might be a stick-thin middle-aged human man with a hint of a stubble and shadows under his eyes, but he still remembers to indulge in his earthly pleasures) and there it goes: she runs a hand through his hair to chisel a cowlick. 

He likes her hands; how they’re soft in spite of all the levers and ladders she’s clung to and pulled herself up—and still, this bit always makes him shudder, just slightly, because of those infinitesimal and giant times when she’d let go.

And for a moment the world doesn’t seem solid under his feet, so he responds with tickling her, poking her in the ribs, splaying his oddly warm hands across her skin. There’s a heartbeat there, under all these layers of clothing and squirming as she groans in annoyance, and he tries very hard to let it anchor him.

…

Tony calls them _disgusting old flirts_. He thinks it’s a little bit of a cliché, if he’s being frank with himself, that _old_ bit. Bit of a low blow.

‘At least your sister still wants to flirt with me,’ the Doctor tells him haughtily; his fringe tied into a ponytail with Rose’s yellow hair tie, reading glasses sliding down his nose. It’s inconceivable, and a little bit pathetic, really: how easily the world lost focus for his human eyes.

‘That is amazing indeed,’ Tony says drily.

In the background, Rose is talking to her mother—grey roots in her hair, not dark, and the Doctor doesn’t know what to make of it, because the old joke doesn’t seem to be working very well in that particular area either, not anymore. Which is disconcerting, simply.

Rose is wearing a big washed-out T-shirt saying _the doctor was here_ in comic sans across her chest, and he can hear Tony sigh.

…

He thinks he gets the hang of having a midlife crisis a little better now, but he still thinks most humans fail to see the real possibility to explore there.

And so they try hijack a mission from other— _fresher_ , their boss had said, _younger_ , he’d meant—agents for the sole reason that it’s connected to a posh 60s-style hotel; and with the concluding sole purpose of roleplaying as clandestine lovers having a sordid liaison there.

He conjures up a backstory for them; having himself be an award winning psychiatrist and her a drug-addicted Broadway actress. He does it mainly to see that indignant pout, one cheek hollowed-out, that feels so much like the earlies days: _leather and Union Jack and dancing_. He finds it more and more thrilling, those little returns. He would have called it all mush and sentimentalism, once.

It spirals downwards from there: they become utterly distracted from the mission as she discovers the miracle of a Torchwood-paid room service and they watch the tray full of tiramisu and strawberry pie be barrelled into their room. They sit, stunned like little children, in their white fluffy dressing gowns.

‘I think someone should storm in now and call us debauched,’ he says thoughtfully, through a mouthful of a truffle, as she tries to force the champagne open with the sonic screwdriver.

‘You know,’ he adds, in a smaller voice, ‘just to add to the vibe.’ 

… 

They almost get suspended from active duty after they come back; distinctly overfed, slightly hungover and lavishly hickey-ed each—and heavily embarrassed. He tries not to think of the way his lower back is aching. He should be more sprightly. 

‘We should have a vacation,’ he says instead, as they perform the walk of shame to Rose’s office, burdened with a heavy load of dullest paperwork, ‘then we would get to scandalise plenty of hotels.’

‘Deal,’ Rose says vehemently, scowling at the smirking Jake.

…

They end up going camping and he gets so severely bitten by mosquitoes that Rose can’t as much touch him without eliciting a distraught scream from him.

‘So if we really have to busy ourselves travelling,’ Rose says with a sigh, ‘where do you want to go?’

But he really doesn’t want to go anywhere, which is a little bit unsettling. But another thing that’s unsettling is the way she still looks like him like he can evaporate with each second, break into particles of blue light and shimmer away, stranding her here in this irrational universe.

‘ _Home_ ,’ he says quietly. 

…

And then, there’s other stuff as well, and it’s confusing, it’s dizzying, and even messier, but he _likes_ it, he likes it a lot.

Her fingers stroke past the collar of his shirt, almost absently, ‘It’s a nice suit.’

It’s a _new_ suit; and it’s neither blue nor brown, which was supposed to be a statement, but at the moment he can’t really recall the reasoning behind it. The reasoning behind _anything_.

‘Thank you, I—ah, I thought I needed something else than… what I mean is, I didn’t want to… I mean, I thought it’d be—’

‘Mm,’ she murmurs, successfully cutting him off, ‘well, you were right, s’nice. But now I’m a bit more interested,” she trails off a moment, eyes skittering down his chest, ‘in getting you out of it.’

He thinks he’s never felt more breathless, respiratory bypass or not.

…

One thing that never fails to amuse him: he has an office now. A bloody _office_ , no less.

He can’t really think of anything to actually _do_ there, though. He still gets so restless.

So he keeps a stock of jam in his cupboard, and a giant picture of a grave-looking Rose pinned to its door.

‘It’s hideous,’ Rose tells him, distraught. ‘Take it down.’

‘No,’ he says pensively, ‘I like this photo. It’s … stern. It tells me of my limits. Humbles me.’

She squints at him, ‘It stops you from eating jam? Really?’ 

‘No,’ the Doctor allows with a sigh, ‘but it does make me feel guilty about it.’

…

And there’s one more thing he likes; although admitting to it proved to be a struggle of battling his own ego.

‘You’re _impossible_ ,’ she sighs, as his only response to yet another attempt to coax him out of the warm and ruffled sheets is a snuffle and a tug, at her, at getting her back _in_. 

He likes how sleep feels for a human; stuffy and almost cloying. 

But also impossibly safe, when he can lean over and encounter her close.

…

And again: a spiral. Funny how these patterns work.

He falls asleep in the bus and misses the stop by seven others, falls asleep while cooking and almost burns the house down, falls asleep on top of Rose as they solve try and solve case on their couch, falls asleep in Jackie’s shed while pretending to fix this or that contraption from her giant mansion.

‘That can’t be healthy,’ she says dubiously one day, when she finds him curled up in the passenger’s seat of her car, dozing peacefully while Bruce Springsteen howls _get outta way, old Dan Tucker!_ at full volume.

‘It’s my treat,’ the Doctor responds drowsily, swaying in the remnants of a very peculiar dream involving the Ood singing in Powell Estate, ‘after all those years of dealing with you in the mornings.’

‘You little shit,’ she says, but cracks a grin. So it counts as a win anyway.

…

First time it’s happened; it’s scared him out of his wits. Left him entirely dazed in the morning, tingling with the traces of her burning skin in the tips of his fingers, detached. Like a vivid dream so palpable and impossible that it feels more like a punch in the gut.

The euphoria comes full-blown and then fades—as gradually as it came, in silent tides—when he listens to her soliloquy about the ghastly contents of their fridge. She’s sitting scantily dressed—or _undressed_ , depending how you think about it and he _doesn’t_ , he’s still too overwhelmed—at their table, kicking up her foot to an inaudible rhythm, chewing on a piece of sparsely buttered toast.

She narrows her eyes at him, warm and known but piercing, and hollows out her left cheek. ‘You’re quiet. You don’t—’ she hesitates, suddenly uncharacteristically uneasy, lifting her thumb to her mouth, ‘regret it, do you?’

He gives a short, incredulous bark of laughter. It feels almost strangled. ‘God, no, I—It’s not that, believe me.’

She picks up a piece of toast, smears it with the remains of jam, and, to his surprise, places on the empty plate in front of him. ‘Now, eat up. You’re too skinny for words, s’a wonder I didn’t get a paper cut.’

The phrase makes him freeze, almost. Slightly stunned, throat tight with the oddest sort of longing and shame, he lifts the toast to his mouth and doesn’t take a bite. Rose’s foot kicks his ankle lightly under the table. She raises her eyebrows at him. ‘So what’s it, then? Existential crisis? Eros and Thanatos?’

‘I’m wondering how can you be happy with _this_ ,’ he blurts before thinking. Rose blinks, and he hastily adds the rest, his hand falling to the plate. The thoughts come spilling, in messy jumbled words, ‘I mean, it’s wonderful. It’s … it’s almost too wonderful, it’s like I could wake up any moment now and be alone, and … but I don’t know what—what do _you_ even see in me. I don’t understand why you’d want to be here. I’m … one step from nothing now—nothing I’d used to be, and less than I’d like to. I thought you’d … I mean, I hoped that—but I would never think—”

Somewhere in the middle of his anxious heart crawling its way out of his mouth, she begins rolling her eyes so theatrically that he breaks off.

‘What?’ he chokes out, distressed.

‘You’re stupid,’ she tells him plainly, voice impossibly warm, sounding as though it explains everything. Her bare foot kicks his shin once again, this time harder. ‘Pass me the jam.’ 

He does.

…

He _still_ likes to be a little git sometimes. He thinks it’s genetics, more than anything.

He gifts her an album to play in her car one day, while he’s out of the town on some sort of a pointless mission with Jake, with a sloppy note attached to it saying _it reminded me of you_. Rightfully wary and suspicious, Rose waits until she’s alone and far away from Torchwood to play it.

A symphonic version of Smash Mouth’s _I’m a Believer_ blares from the speakers. Rose curses loudly into her phone, and the Doctor chuckles.

…

She curses a lot. He _likes_ it. ‘Watch your language, young lady,’ he tells her once, tut-tutting with a sanctimonious little smirk. Rose responds with an accurate adjective and he nearly coughs on his coffee due to laughter.

…

There comes first frost and they walk in the swirling snow and he tries to pretend he can do that as carelessly as he’d used to, jacketless and radiant with liveliness.

He catches a cold. A cold, _him_. He hates that, for sure, so at least it gives him something to hate at last. And he makes a point of showing it.

They stay in the house, in bathrobes and pyjamas, Rose having coffee and sneaking in the various alternations of ‘told you’ into the conversation as he winces over his milk with honey, throat wrapped with a scarf.

After initial dismay, however ( _Rose won’t kiss him because apparently, that’s yucky. ‘Wasn’t yucky when we were in that police car in Glasgow and I had my mouth down your—’ ‘Shut it.’_ ) he discovers that he does like it. This, this cosying up.

The funny thing is, after some time it’s stopped scaring him.

… 

‘No, you don’t,’ Rose says impassively from over her crossword, sprawled across their sagged blue velvet sofa from an Italian flea market, ‘You don’t pay your mortgage. _Vitex_ pays your mortgage.’ 

‘Semantics,’ he huffs.

He’s used to think of the mortgage as a line that won’t _do_ with crossing. But it fascinates him now, in a way. Makes him feel independent; as though by overstepping the little boundaries he’s directing a giant smirk at his Time Lord alter-ego. Or something along the lines.

He doesn’t usually allow himself to dwell on what that Other him may or may not feel like, because he doesn’t like to feel so cold that his fingers grow numb.

And it happens regardless, inevitably: he doesn’t like the way Rose looks small and guilty and how neither can quite look the other in the eye when they stumble upon a memory that burns dry in the throat instead of being simply warm.

_(He still wouldn’t have it in reverse. Warm memories that turn into cold realisation versus little stings of coldness, it might be a double-sided sword but he’s still at the right side.)_

… 

They adopt a cat. Correction; Rose ends up adopting one, angrily orange, mildly fluorescent at night, radiation-soaked and overall fairly ugly creature that tends to hoot like a pigeon instead of meowing; and which has been kicked out of every household it’d graced before theirs. He sulks at first, but then buries the hatchet. He calls the cat Dalek.

He doesn’t foresee the instance Rose creeping around the house, cooing, ‘Dalek, Dalek, come to mummy!’ as she makes kissy noises.

But such things can be forgiven. Sometimes he wakes up in an empty house, and there’s a low ache inside him, and a dead silence around. He fights this dissipating feeling, but it’s overpowering. 

( _There has to be a price.)_

And when she comes back from wherever she’d been, be it a mission, or simply catching a breath, she’s just as warm and anxious as he is, and just as clumsy as he clings to her.

Or maybe she clings to him. He’s never sure, and it never really matters.

…

And, remembering or not, there’s a lot more of this now, anyway. Those small significant matters: gestures of belonging. Or perhaps just gestures of making sure.

She lifts his hand to her mouth and presses a light kiss to his fingers. He feels his heart heavy in his chest.

‘I’ve always loved your hands,’ she says, very quietly.

He closes his eyes then, and tries not to think how blasphemous and undeserved it all is. And how unbearably wonderful.


End file.
